The Worlds of Arthur Staaz

exile

Nothing makes sense in the world of human relationships, I accept that. It hurts, even if I am not always immediately aware of the pain. As a result, I have explored various meditative practices. None of them have been able to raise me up from the gloom of regret and self-doubt. Sometimes, I drink. The lights of the city grow dim in the haze of cheap whiskey and smog. Shadows circulate like eddies in a river around my reclining body. I go to dark places. But none so perfect in its darkness as Catatonia.

Catatonia, how my heart yearns for you, lost land of dreams and reveries! Catatonia, that place where my mind wandered over bare hills and shadowed valleys, through cities decadent and gilded with the detritus of lost civilizations. Long did I haunt your abandoned abbeys and ancient walls. Oft did I wave the black flag from your city gates or nestle into the darkest corners of your public houses. Oh Catatonia, what have you given me in exchange for the love I gave you, the devotion unto death, my very soul. You have abandoned me, forced me into exile, sent forever beyond your lichen-encrusted walls to wander alone in the shining glass-and-metal cities and the hum-drum roadways of an ordinary world.

What have I done to you that I should deserve this fate? Was my transgression so great that I should be banished? Catatonia, where have you gone? What road was it I took away from you? Why does it not lead back to you? Catatonia, I know you can hear me? I speak your languages.

He lost his home, his medieval bastion, on a soft summer day, tipsy on pints of porter and late to the required observances. He joined a few of the young men in the back. There to gaze at the young ladies and to keep their elders at bay. In a conspiracy of silence, he and another vowed not to tell. They were leaving. So far as each knew, the other never told. He ran back to the public house with wings on his feet, ready to receive the sacraments. But he would never quench his thirst.

For his sins, he was banished. Forevermore, he would reside outside the invisible walls of the medieval borough that he loved. Now, he was a stranger. And strange it became to visit its streets, to feel the unseen wall that separated him from people he had loved and would have died for. They didn’t know him. It was all a dream, it seemed. But it was real. The dreams became even more painful than waking reality. It wasn’t so much that he had abandoned the gods of the polis. He had dared to pass through its walls, to go to the place where the gods lived. And there? He found nothing. Or perhaps such a chaos of fullness that, well, it might as well have been emptiness. It was certainly a sort of madness.

Mystical practices. He tried. But where the sage points to the emptiness he sees instead dead colors, purposeless movement, always. And the melding of all things into amorphous oblivion. He is destroyed, not by the void but by the all. Still, he tries. He chants. He breathes. The muscles knot in the back of his neck. He braces himself for the next leg of his journey.

And after all, it’s all the one, right? Gurus. Messiahs. Conquering prophets. Sages. Shamans. Troubadors. Why not unite them? Why not universalize them? So he found a cult that unitized and univeralized. Only, he kept asking himself, “What’s the point?” It was like wandering through the desert only to find a group of people lost, listening to a lecture about the desert from someone who is just as lost as everyone else. We’re in the fucking desert, he thought. He didn’t want to hear about the desert, wasn’t looking for an invitation to explore it. It didn’t seem to have done the unitizers and universalizers much good. They weren’t getting anywhere. Intellectualizing, theorizing, sermonizing were not going to get anybody out of this waterless place.

So, he left the sparse shade of that place and travelled on, longing again to be inside the walls where no one knew him, though he had spent a lifetime with them. He tried to sneak in through the back door, through chapels perilous with all the correct trappings – miters, ceremony, incense. He prayed, meditated, sang, screamed, moved, dipped toes in foreign waters, returned, played with cards and sought his future. All to no avail. He sought out cults that preached confidently that one could so easily return inside the medieval walls through a simple statement of faith in a man-god. He tried to believe that, yes, the mere speaking of words, whether by head or heart, could magically transport him inside the walls. But they didn’t. There were still chimera on the road out of town and spectral sounds that beckoned him.

So, he found himself in the labyrinth outside the walls. There he remains. He has come to realize that inside the walls is a sort of museum, a living exhibit. People take on characters for the day while he visits. And it is all very believable. But at night, the actors go home to the labyrinth – whether they knew it or not. The city behind the walls becomes deserted and lifeless. A theatrical set.

He passes the actors there in the labyrinth now. They either vaguely recognize him or don’t recognize him at all. That suits him fine, though a hidden part of him comes out every so often to yearn for the Disney-like non-reality of the world behind the walls.